February 24, 2015

Automate the Tableau License Rotation Process

A new year brought a new license key for Tableau. This means having to get every single user swapped over to the new key so that we could get an accurate count of the licenses we're utilizing. This process involved a couple of steps:

Automatically remove Tableau Desktop from any computer that has not used it in the last 30 days (of course they can always re-install)

Swap out the old license key with the new license key

I hooked up with the amazing Luke Robles on the Facebook IT Infrastructure team to see if there was a way to automate this process. The first part, removing Tableau Desktop, is handled through some of our internal tools. For the process of rotating the license key, not only did Luke make it work, he open sourced it for everyone to use.

You can grab the code on Github. Note, this code is for Mac installations only. I'll post the PC code once it's ready, but the process itself should be fairly similar if you want to take a crack at it on your own.